Psych, Lies, and Audiotape: The Tarnished Legacy of the Milgram Shock Experiments | - 2 views
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subjects — 780 New Haven residents who volunteered — helped make an untenured assistant professor named Stanley Milgram a national celebrity. Over the next five decades, his obedience experiments provided the inspiration for films, fiction, plays, documentaries, pop music, prime-time dramas, and reality television. Today, the Milgram experiments are considered among the most famous and most controversial experiments of all time. They are also often used in expert testimony in cases where situational obedience leads to crime
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Perry’s evidence raises larger questions regarding a study that is still firmly entrenched in American scientific and popular culture: if Milgram lied once about his compromised neutrality, to what extent can we trust anything he said? And how could a blatant breach in objectivity in one of the most analyzed experiments in history go undetected for so long?
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the debate has never addressed this question: to what extent can we trust his raw data in the first place? In her riveting new book, Behind the Shock Machine: The Untold Story of the Notorious Milgram Psychology Experiments, Australian psychologist Gina Perry tackles this very topic, taking nothing for granted
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Her chilling investigation of the experiments and their aftereffects suggests that Milgram manipulated results, misled the public, and flat out lied in order to deflect criticism and further the thesis for which he would become famous
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She contends that serious factual inaccuracies cloud our understanding of Milgram’s work, inaccuracies which she believes arose “partly because of Milgram’s presentation of his findings — his downplaying of contradictions and inconsistencies — and partly because it was the heart-attack variation that was embraced by the popular media
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Perry reveals that Milgram massaged the facts in order to deliver the outcome he sought. When Milgram presented his finding — namely, high levels of obedience — both in early papers and in his 1974 book, Obedience to Authority, he stated that if the subject refused the lab coat’s commands more than four times, the subject would be classified as disobedient. But Perry finds that this isn’t what really happened. The further Milgram got in his research, the more he pushed participants to obey.
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only after criticism of his ethics surfaced, and long after the completion of the studies, did Milgram claim that “a careful post-experimental treatment was administered to all subjects,” in which “at the very least all subjects were told that the victim had not received dangerous electric shocks.” This was, quite simply, a lie. Milgram didn’t want word to spread through New Haven that he was duping his subjects, which could taint the results of his future trials.
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If the Milgram of Obedience to Authority were the narrator in a novel, I wouldn’t have found him terribly reliable. So why had I believed such a narrator in a work of nonfiction?
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I do trust them not to lie about the rules or results of their experiments. And if a scientist does lie, especially in such a famous experiment, I trust that another scientist will quickly uncover the deception. Or at least I used to.
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At the time, Milgram was 27, fresh out of grad school and needing to make a name for himself in a hyper-competitive department, and Perry suggests that his “career depended on [the subjects’] obedience; all his preparations were aimed at making them obey.”
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Milgram’s studies — which suggest that nearly two-thirds of subjects will, under certain conditions, administer dangerously powerful electrical shocks to a stranger when commanded to do so by an authority figure — have become a staple of psychology departments around the world. They have even helped shape the rules that govern experiments on human subjects. Along with Zimbardo’s 1971 Stanford prison experiment, which showed that college students assigned the role of “prison guard” quickly started abusing college students assigned the role of “prisoner,” Milgram’s experiments are the starting point for any meaningful discussion of the “I was only following orders” defense, and for determining how the relationship between situational factors and obedience can lead seemingly good people to do horrible things.
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While Milgram’s defenders point to subsequent recreations of his experiments that have replicated his findings, the unethical nature, not to mention the scope and cost, of the original version have not allowed for full duplications.